General Robotics Micro? GRC 11/X3

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Wed May 2 17:57:28 2001

On May 2, 16:29, ip500 wrote:
> Interesting find at the VaTech auction last weekend. I never heard
of
> General Robotics Corp ... anyone else?? The size of a rack mount micro
> but it uses DEC PDP-11 cards [has a M-8186] plus a bunch of GR
> propriatary
> cards. Odd but neat. Any info always appreciated.
> Craig

GR made a few cards for QBus systems. I have a GR "RX02" which has a
50-pin Shugart interface and works with ordinary 8" drives. It's a
dual-height card. It's also capable of handling dual-sided "RX03" format,
and I think up to 4 drives. There's an on-board bootstrap option. Plessey
made (badged?) a very similar (if not identical) board. I think I have the
manual somewhere. These boards were quite popular. I've seen one built
into a single 8" drive case with an M8186 (11/23) and an M8047 (MXV11-A).

I also have a GR DHV11, 16-channel QBus multiplexer, with channel zero
mapped to the console address. It's a quad-high and needs a special
3U-high distribution box, which has (IIRC) three stacked PCBs containing a
Z80 and some "stuff". Unfortunately mine is faulty :-( I don't have any
docs, all I know is that it appears at addresses 160020-160036 (DHV11) and
170500-170502 (DM11 multiplexer) as well as 177560-177566 (console).
 According to my register dump, that is.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York
Received on Wed May 02 2001 - 17:57:28 BST

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